People ask for a price before they've described the job, and software agencies hand one over anyway. We don't. The only number we'll quote you is a spec-first number — and that sequence is the entire trick.
A spec is not a 40-page requirements document. It's a short, plain-language map of the job the system has to do: what comes in, what goes out, what breaks, and what "working" means to your business. It's written in words your team already uses, not in UML or user stories.
What a spec actually contains
When we start an engagement, the design phase (2–4 weeks) produces a spec that covers:
- The job the system has to do. Not the features — the job. "Settle daily transactions against bank statements without human intervention" is a job. "Payment reconciliation dashboard" is a feature. We write about the job.
- Who uses it and how. Every actor in the system — the staff member who reviews edge cases, the API consumer that sends transactions, the finance lead who needs the end-of-day report.
- What "working" means, precisely. For apayments reconciliation system, "working" means 99.98% uptime and zero undetected mismatches — not "it usually runs". The spec names these numbers so the price reflects them.
- The edges and exceptions. What happens when a bank file arrives late? What happens when a transaction amount doesn't match? These are the cases that turn a simple system into an expensive one — and they're far cheaper to discover during design than during build.
- What we're not building. Scope has two edges. The spec names what the system does, and also names what it deliberately doesn't do. Changes to either edge are change requests — visible and priced, not absorbed silently.
Why order matters
When we price against a spec, both sides are pricing the same thing. You're not buying an unknown quantity of software. You're buying a specific system with a defined edge, and the number we agree on means something real.
- You get a price you can plan a budget around.
- We get a scope we can be held accountable to.
- Changes are visible, because the baseline is written down.
This is directly connected to why we own the wholesystem lifecycle — design, build, harden, operate. When the same team that priced the spec is the team that builds against it and then operates the result in production, they have every incentive to write an accurate spec. There's no handoff where the spec gets lost, and no new team discovering three months later that the real requirements were different.
What the spec phase actually looks like
The design phase is 2–4 weeks of structured discovery. We:
- Sit with the people who do the work today — not just the decision-makers, but the staff member who handles the edge cases, the operations lead who knows where the current system breaks.
- Map the data flows: what comes in, what gets transformed, what gets stored, what goes out, and what happens when any of those steps fails.
- Identify the components the system needs — Core platform, Data pipeline, Integrations, Automation — and where the boundaries between them are. See our full service components for what each layer covers.
- Write the spec in plain language, review it with you, and iterate until you recognise your business in the document.
Only after the spec is agreed do we write the number.
The part nobody says
A spec-first number is usually higher than the number an agency quotes after a 30-minute call. That's the point. The cheap number is the price of finding out later what you actually needed. Ours is the price of knowing — and of having a team that stays accountable through operations, not just until delivery.
The cheap number also doesn't include the cost of the arguments about scope that happen six weeks into build when it turns out the spec was ambiguous. Those arguments are expensive, stressful, and entirely avoidable.
We'd rather lose a job to honesty than win it with a number that was never real.
If a vendor quotes you a firm price before understanding your operations, treat it as a warning. The fair price comes after the map, not before it.
If you're ready to start mapping the job, thecontact page explains exactly what we need from you and what you'll get back within one business day.